We're demonizing civil rights protesters as if we were living in the 1960s all over again.

There's a tendency these days for Americans to look back at the 1960s with rose-colored glasses, to believe that the horrors that were visited upon protesters back then -- from the dogs sent to attack Selma marchers to the four dead at the Kent State shootings -- were watched by a nation that had come together in horror at these events. It's a myth that allows modern people to believe that if they had only lived through those times, they would have had the opinion that history has shown to be the correct one: They would have sided with the protesters against the police and the National Guard sent to stifle them. But the sad fact is that protesters back then, just as the protesters in Ferguson nowadays, were not actually greeted with a strong wave of support across the land, and quite a few people who'd like to believe they would have been on the side of the protesters back then were just as likely to have sided with the forces trying to suppress them.

Recent polling data from the Pew Research Center shows a dramatic racial divide in how Americans perceive the shooting of Mike Brown by a Ferguson police officer and the protests -- and the police crackdown -- that has erupted in the wake of the shooting. Eighty percent of black Americans agree that Brown's shooting raises racial issues, but only 37% of white people agree. Sixty-five percent of black people agree that the police have gone too far in Ferguson, but despite the fact that the cops look more like an invading army than public servants engaging in crowd control, only 33% of white people openly oppose the way the police are handling things. Meanwhile, 52% of white Americans have confidence that the investigation of the Mike Brown shooting will be handled fairly, whereas only 18% of black Americans agree.

No doubt, many white Americans are quite sincere in their belief that the police are doing the right thing, that justice knows no race in this country, and that racism is no big deal anymore. But it's also important to remember that those were widely shared opinions in the 60s, as well. Watching conservative media outlets focus on the minority of protesters who are looting at the expense of the majority who are not, I find myself reflecting on some of the observations about public response to protesters in the 60s that Rick Perlstein collects in his bestselling history of the era titled Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

"Southern segregationists" he writes, denied that police dogs were being sicced on innocent protesters, insisting instead "dogs had been rendered rabid by the Selma marchers 'sex smell' ". The racism is almost comically strange in retrospect, but it's a direct precursor to media figures poring over Brown's rap lyrics like musical tastes somehow caused his fate.

It's not always about race. Anyone perceived to be a threat to the status quo is likely to be victim-blamed and demonized. In the part of Nixonland addressing the Kent State shootings, Perlstein notes that a full 58% of Americans blamed the victims of the shootings at the time. "A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off," he writes of one of the victims, "was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell." It wasn't true, of course, but the post-death demonizing of Miller is eerily similar to the way that widespread media reports focus on Brown's marijuana use and alleged shoplifting, even though neither of these things was known to Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown, when he riddled Brown's body with six bullets.

From a historical distance, it's easy for those who aren't in the line of fire to empathize with the targets of police brutality and repression. In 2014, Martin Luther King Jr. is treated like a national hero, so much so that it's easy to forget that he was persecuted by the FBI and accused of encouraging "murder, arson, and looting" in the pages of the National Review in 1965. But gaining that empathy in hindsight does little good to people who are struggling in the here and now. It's a shame to see so many people, in the 21st century, fall into the same traps that their predecessors did in the 60s and 70s: Casting around for reasons to demonize civil rights and anti-war protesters, blaming victims for violence against them, and spreading nasty rumors to justify policy brutality. What the country needs is for there to be a little more empathy that's given to the protesters in the past shared with the protesters standing up today.